Friday, October 22, 2010

The youth vote is being targeted in a big way by the administration again. The obvious pandering to the variousvotingblocks in the past week has been pretty blatant. But the war being waged for youth votes is beyond belief. (Although the fact that Illinois hand deliveredballots to prisoners comes pretty close - are the cemeteries next?)

Last week, President Obama did a town hall meeting in conjunction with MTV, BET and CMT. Hopeful participants had to give their political point of view and a headshot to be considered. He will also be appearing on Mythbusters and The Daily Show. After all, nothing says 'presidential' like satire. No doubt the stoners watching the Daily Show will get a kick out of seeing him on the show, but don't expect them to get off their sofas on Nov. 2nd to vote. In the vernacular, they tend to 'flake out' a lot. As for the Mythbusters episode which will air Dec 8th but was recorded recently, ironically enough the myth has already been busted. But, true to form, Obama is simply not one to admit when something didn't work, and so it's deja vu all over again.

Trying to grab their attention on tv isn't enough for this oh so desperate party. So now they are resorting to actually raiding Cincinatti high schools for (hopefully) voting aged kids to take to the polling place to vote, give them sample ballots for only democrat candidates, and then an ice cream afterwards (at least it's not cigarettes this time) for their contribution to the cause. Did they get a pat on the head, too? How about a participation ribbon - we want to make sure everyone feels really good about the choices they made, now don't we?

Needless to say there is a lawsuit pending on that one, but there are also four more high schools targeted for GOTV efforts next week, too. Shameless.

There has also been a flurry of campus speeches as well, but none of it seems to be doing the trick. Attendance at the rallies has been good, but the numbers look bad for the party in power. Many of their followers are disillusioned by the reality of Hope and Change and are more interested in getting a job than furthering the Pelosi/Obama agenda. As for me, I'd just like to know how much all this campaigning is going to cost.

Considering how focused on the halcyon days of the '60's and '70's the party is, they must surely be thinking about the last time the youth were seriously disillusioned. The Nixon-era ripples must be in the backs of their minds. Surely they are seeing how things are trending, knowing there is a chance of generational defection. They have a hardcore base, to be sure, but they have seriously overestimated their numbers. Only 18% of the electorate self-identify as liberal. As opposed to 54% conservative and 27% for moderates. They can't afford to lose any more liberals off the reservation, so they are desperately trying to ride herd on them. And therein lies the identity politics rub: it's hard to unite groups that are steeped in division. It is time consuming, if nothing else, having to address each individual group in their own setting.
Until recently, one of the largest democrat voting blocks, both for turnout and reliability, has been women. That they are slipping there, too, is making them redouble their efforts with the youth voter. And so they are pulling out all the stops to woo back the youth. Even to targeting high school kids and plying them with a field trip/day off and an ice cream. So what if a few laws are broken in the process? As our good buddy Saul says, the ends justify the means

Thursday, October 14, 2010

This week seems to be meme destruction week. It has been a devastating week for some well-worn liberal canards. Two different vehemently upheld liberal/progressive beliefs have been proved wrong and one is under heavy fire. We seem to be reaching a point of implosion for the democrat party and the fallout is not restricted to just the halls of Congress.

First on the chopping block was the much-hyped "shovel ready jobs" that were used to sell the Porkulus bill. According to President Obama in a recent New York Times piece, he has since learned that

Apparently the only thing shovel ready about that bill was the bill itself.... Too bad Mr. Obama couldn't have figured out the futility of the effort before he spent a trillion dollars of other people's money.

And then there is the meme that the Tea Parties are chock-a-block full of racist signs carried by white-hooded klansmen out for blood. All the press and liberals have been talking about is how incredibly, overtly racist and dangerous the movement is. Eh, not so much, it turns out. The woman who did the study has liberal creds, inasmuch as she is a graduate student from UCLA. For anyone who has attended a Tea Party, the results of this study are unsurprising. What is surprising is the fact that the Washington Post actually carried the story. Doubtless the rest of the neo-pravda media will be all over this story and apologize for their biased, flat-out wrong coverage of the movement. Yeah, riiiiiiiight.

Another meme that is in the process of being busted is the one about conservatism being solely the jurisdiction of whites. In a piece in Ebony Magazine entitled "The Browning of the GOP", author Armstrong Williams makes the case for the growing number of self-identified Black Republicans and their place in the history of the GOP. He also explains the single event that caused the exodus from republicans to democrats in the 1960's - an exodus that has been the norm for so long that Democrats have managed to fool the black community into thinking they were always democrats. But, as Mr. Williams states:

But today, the great flight has the chance to be met by the great return as a new breed of Black conservative has emerged and taken center stage in the Republican Party.

This meme has not yet been busted, but it seems to be coming off the tracks. The best argument in favor of the Ebony article is the unprecidented fourteen black republican candidates running for Congress this fall. Primary season boasted a whopping thirty-two black conservative candidates vying for the republican nod. There is a very good chance that three of them will win their elections, which would set a record for the most black republicans since Reconstruction. It is a small number, but it is a start, and hopefully more black conservatives will step up and run in the future. If Messrs. West, Scott and Frasier are any indication of the caliber of candidate in the offing, the Republican party could hardly do better.

The liberal/progressive talking points seem to be going down like a line of dominoes. Not only are their recent claims being proven to be false, but even long-held positions are being challenged.